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My space is limited, and therefore so are my storage options. Up until last weekend I was storing my zippers in little plastic boxes shoved into a plastic drawer in one of those storage stacks. The drawers are so weighted down that they sag in the back and I can hardly get them in or out when I need something. I also had SO many zippers that I was having to spread them out over several little boxes. The zipper monkey was one that I definitely wanted off of my back! By final tally I had 118 zippers of various lengths, styles and colors. That becomes a problem when trying to find a place to put them! lol. I didn’t want to get rid of a bunch of them, although I did manage to part with 5 or 6 of them… but I wanted to keep the majority of them because even though I probably paid a total of $15 for all of them together, it would cost me FAR more than that to try and replace them. Some of them are salvaged from discarded garments, most of them were purchased at thrift stores for next to nothing and only a hand full of them came new from the craft store.
I had to first get them all in one place, There was a huge pile on the couch that was frightening Brooni. lol. She went and hid while I sorted out which ones I felt I could give away and the ones that needed to be thrown away because they were damaged. The next step to having them set up the way I wanted was to iron them all. Most of them smoothed out really well, but a few that were stored rolled for 50+ years Won’t be flat until they are sewn into something. After I had them all ironed (which took forever) I measured each one and labeled them on the back side with the length. Now came the big choice: Do I separate them by length or by color? To me, anything but by color would look like an absolute mess, so I laid them out in proper rainbow fashion like you see above.
I had no room to store them INside anything, so my only option as I saw it was to store them out in the open. I had a nice little space on the wall next to my craft desk where I thought they would look nice. I decided to hang them from a wooden dowel that I had bought for another project that I never got around to starting. I didn’t want to paint the dowel, and I didn’t want to make a fabric sleeve for it, so I decided to wrap it with twine. Several months ago I bought a small box of antique handmade lace and lace making supplies in it. One of the supply items was a spool of hot pink twine. I used a pin to hold one end of it in place and began wrapping the dowel by knotting it, this also created a nice twisting pattern on the rod. The image above demonstrates how to wrap with a knot.
Once the rod was completed I tied off both ends and then lit a tea light candle. Once enough of the wax was melted down I blew out the candle and dipped my tied ends into the wax and let it dry. This keeps the ends from sliding off the rod and coming unraveled. My dowl was very thin, so I chose to anchor it to the wall in three places, each end and the middle. I used the J-hooks that we had so that we could hang things in these plaster walls! They made a nice little place for the rod to rest securely. Next I took the zippers in the order I had laid them out in and ran a piece of thread through each with a needle and then tied them off to create small loops. Finally i slide the zippers onto the rod , spaced them how I wanted and then placed it all back on the hooks. When I need a zipper, I can simply snip the thread and there you go!
It came out looking like a really cool art piece of sorts and is very functional! It took a couple of days to set it up initially, but now that the main body of them are done, it will be easy to add one or two here and there as I acquire them.
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